Retail this holiday season will continue trends from last year, with longer store hours and increasing focus on Internet sales. But as usual, the situation is different for smaller retailers, who are competing where they can and taking detours when they must.
Faster Shopping Clock
The holiday shopping season is six days shorter this year because Thanksgiving fell on a later calendar date. That prompted many retailers to begin having sales before Thanksgiving that would normally have begun today, Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Some even began offering deals last month.
However, experts say the foreshortened shopping month will likely do little to change people’s behavior, which usually finds them waiting until around Dec. 10 to begin shopping in earnest.
What’s more, shoppers are not as likely to be influenced by the calendar as they are by the economy, which, though sluggish, is not expected to be a major deterrent this year.
Online Sales
Still, retailers aren’t risking it. More than a quarter of respondents in Shop.org’s eHoliday survey said they were beefing up the online shopping experience in direct response to the economy this year.
“Retailers have been preparing for months, smartly investing in what’s important to online shoppers: value, free shipping, a user-friendly site, and flexible returns, among other features,” said Shop.org executive director Vicki Cantrell.
This season, however, increased attention to mobile platforms marks a significant shift. ComScore, a Virginia-based Internet analytics company, listed “smartphones and sit-back shopping” among the top digital trends this season. They suggest that even if every retailer does not need its own app, mobile strategy is essential for reaching new audiences.
Cyber Monday
Last year, 129 million people participated in Cyber Monday, the major online shopping day on the Monday following Thanksgiving, according to Shop.org. ComScore projects Monday to be the heaviest online spending day in history, approaching $2 billion, 20 percent or more than last year.
For large retailers, the Internet remains a crucial focal point as it has for the past several years, but smaller retailers generally cannot compete on Cyber Monday.
Retailers of all sizes are expected to increase their use of social media this season. The eHoliday survey found that nearly 55 percent of companies surveyed would increase their use of Facebook in November and December. About 60 percent would increase their use of Pinterest and 55 percent would use Instagram more.
Local Retailers
Upstate retailers are also taking advantage of social media, but staying out of the Cyber Monday fray. They are adopting some big-box tactics such as early sales and extended hours, but also relying on what they feel they can do differently.
Pedal Chic tried to answer bigger retailers’ efforts with a blowout pre-Thanksgiving sale for the first time, discounting items it normally would not and offering deeper discounts for the first two hours of Black Friday.
However, the women-focused cycling store is relying on next month’s Downtown Greenville Holiday Happening campaign – the first concerted effort among downtown businesses – to present small businesses as an alternative. The Augusta Road Business Association has already done this well for a couple of years.
Manager Lisa Parks said business owners have been meeting weekly for months in preparation for the holidays. One decision it made was to be the antidote to the frenzied, door-buster holiday shopping experience.
“We’re trying to go about our shopping season in a slightly different way,” Parks said. “We want it to be joyful… we just want to bring the love and warmth back to the holiday season.”
That includes a little joy for business owners and their employees. Parks said the group agreed to keep the same extended hours, and that those hours would be reasonable so that neither they nor their employees would be unduly overworked. With that, they seem to have taken a page from Ebenezer Scrooge’s playbook – the end of the book, that is.
